Biomes - environments that fall into a certain category - are a great way to set the atmosphere for a specific adventure. We all know of deserts, forests, swamps, mountains, and so forth, and each of these biomes have their own iconic adventures and adventure sites.

But the real world is full of obscure, unique environments that aren't known to many people - let alone #ttrpg players, which makes them a great option to bring variety to a game - and fantasy and science fiction has come up with all sorts of further biomes that aren't known on Earth. So what are your favorite obscure biomes?

Personally, I am fascinated by so-called "Cloud Forests" ever since I heard of the concept. They are usual tropical or subtropical forests which, due to their geographic locations, are shrouded in fogs for much of the year. In RPG settings, forests often hide many dangers due to their low visibility - and so does fog. It's two great tastes that go well together!

Swamps. There's a good one in Baldur's Gate 3 that I would like to see expanded in some future game. Basically the swamp is just a wetland when you first show up but if you pass an investigation check it becomes a fetid swamp. There are some dangers like plants that cause you to bleed and then if you don't heal you get infected with a disease. Unfortunately it's just a small area but it'd be so fun as like a whole campaign I think. Maybe with a spore druid, gloomstalker, and necromancer.

The traps there are brutal

swamps in Valheim are fuck

Where in the world is the photo from?

God fucking damn they suck when you first encounter them. But in the appropriate way.

The island I spawned into on my first play through didn't have swamp. Eventually I started to sail a raft in a straight line. Oops.

@juergen_hubertThe chapparal, or similar semi-arid locations. You see lots of plains and lots of deserts, but rarely the scrublands in between.

I took it from Wikipedia, which says that it is from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica.

My favorite biome! I always make a permanent home in the Swamp!

For land environments, I can't think of any that have been unused, but for aquatic adventures there are a few possibilities:

• Coral Reefs - a whole maze full of creatures
• Sargasso Sea - Vast mats of impassible plants containing wrecks, hidden islands, etc.
• Deep-sea vents - the closest thing we have to an alien environment on earth..

A few that have come up in my group are maritime chaparral, savannah, karst hills, and fog forest.

The fog forest was my favorite: we had a culture in the area that would burn the forest in the summer to encourage beneficial plants to grow the rest of the year. We called it "the smoky forest" and decided it was generally clouded in fog, smoke, or both depending on the season. In our description it resembled a coastal redwood forest.

I was gonna say this too, except i always found swamp biomes really nice and comforting. Something about it not being a wide open space I guess

I did a short lived and heavily modified Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign once. I made it kind of a lousiana bayou vibe, complete with spooky voodoo swamp gnomes. Wished it went further cause I loved the setting, but scheduling did it in in the end!

Its not earth based but Subnautica touches on a those environments quite a bit.

Howabout:

Currently, actively calving glacial field.

Cave system that is only fully traversable via fully immersed swimming. Throw in bioluminescence if you have some pity.

Any kind of environment where the flora are actually radiotrophes, but you don't know that yet.

Melting tundra prone to methane leaks/explosions/ghost fires inside of trees. No, I didn't fart, but we are all about to asphyxiate.

'Hole in the sky' environments where due to atmospheric degradation / large scale geomagnetic anomalies... you're either gonna need serious UV protection, or else everyone is getting really tired, very thirsty, and seriously sunburned, very very fast.

Also all the locals have so much cancer that it's a part of their religion/culture.

WW1 rainy mud wasteland... the entire area is basically quicksand.

Toxic salt flats.

Some kind of niche micro biome where the flora/fauna just actually rely on the evaporation/condensation cycle + regular vortexes to breed/propagate.

Like a species that has a lifecycle that begins and ends in the water, but the majority of it is spent on land.

They get to land by a bunch of fertilized eggs being fairly regularly hoovered up into the sky, which are then rained down on the surrounding area.

And finally:

That's not a bunch of pretty ponds, those are geothermal pools.

Baaaaa